Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling
by Fractured Artifact No. 248
Summary: The entry level textbook for all Hogwarts students for the past century explains the most fundamental rules of magic. The problem is, when you try and explain magic, it fights back. Foreword by Marcus Montefiore
1. Foreword, Backward, and Edward

0

The United Confederation of People With Too Much Time On Their Hands

Present:

**Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling**

We present for your perusal, an abridged copy of the Hogwarts required supplement Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling. Magical Theory is an entry level text of an advanced and mystic subject. For many generations of students, both Hogwarts and abroad, it has been the jumping off point for understanding the basic functions and laws of magic. It is this basic understanding of how the very smallest, simplest things work, that every other grand enchantment is built upon. This was the starting point for every great wizard from Albus Dumbledore to the more recent magical golden boy, Neville Longbottom.

This copy is an updated and revised reprinting of the original 1880 work, distributed in a digital medium in 2017, a few years after the reconstruction following the third World War. The language was edited by Fred and George Weasley to better reflect the modern vernacular. A foreword was written by Hogwarts Professor and Chair of Magic Circuits Marcus Montefiore.

Please keep in mind, in this narrative, time turners do not exist. No spell can manipulate time.

We are legally obligated to inform you we have no creative rights to anything we are writing about.

* * *

**Foreword, Backward, and Edward by Marcus Montefiore**

Adalbert Waffling was the 19th century's most eminent magical theoretician. His flagship work, Mesolithic Conduits and Their Influences on Transfiguring Rubber Ducks, redefined how the wizarding world approached the problem of retroactive combinatorial conjuring and, to a lesser extent, communal bathing. Within his lifetime he would write a further 37 books, one of which, Simplified Locomotion, is 187 volumes long and any library that wishes to add it to their collection has to build on a new wing.

It was after this whale of a textbook with its sadistically deceptive title that Adalbert Waffling stepped down from his cloud and realized, inspired as his work was, the common wizard could never understand it. The common witch had a passable handle on it, but it was just beyond the common wizard.

This was a common problem at the time. All over the world witches and wizards were using magic without actually knowing how it worked. The results were as disastrous as you would expect. Kelpies were running amuck in a loch in Scotland. Fire rained down Burwick upon Tweed. For three weeks, a bunny ruled over Britain. Mr. Cuddles implemented social welfare reforms the Muggle Kingdom of Great Britain is using to this day.

In those chaotic, admittedly entertaining, times there was no widely accepted theory of magic. The research on it was scattershot, books on the subject were thin on the ground, and the headmaster of Hogwarts had his hands full looking for his pet rabbit. Adalbert Waffling took up the call and assembled a rudimentary explanation on the fundamentals of magic that a beginner could grasp and build on in the future. It took him two years to complete the work, and another twenty of editing before he could get all the words under seven syllables. Despite his honest intentions, the book is still a hard read and takes up the whole first three years at Hogwarts and is referenced in Charms, Transfiguration, and Potions. The Houselves have strict instructions to whisper passages from it to sleeping students.

The publication of that work, Magical Theory, was one of those rare and beautiful things that did exactly what the maker wanted it to do: it gave the general wizarding public a working knowledge of magic. While it's true that there are some wizards and witches that, through a limit of their own talent or inclination, will only ever think of magic as pretty lights that make things happen, there were wizards that ingrained the new information and ran with it to the cutting edge. That basic knowledge of how the smallest parts work they could gradually build up more complex spells. In the decades following Magical Theory's addition to the syllabus of Hogwarts there was a dramatic increase in magical innovation. In the centuries before, new spells were invented once in a lifetime. In the first year of Magical Theory's publication, seventy-two new charms were invented. Concurrently, God only knows how many new curses were invented that first month, which goes to show that knowledge is the arms dealer that sells to both sides.

Nightmarish implication of tailor made curses notwithstanding, Magical Theory, while debatable as a force for good or evil, was indisputably a force to be reckoned with. When the pureblood supremacists lost the battle to have muggleborns excluded from Hogwarts in 1880, their next move was to attempt to have Magical Theory restricted as reading material. Their plan backfired in the most hilarious way possible; nothing makes a book more popular than banning it. Magical Theory has been translated into more than thirty-two languages, though the title has never been available in French. When wizard kind came out of hiding at the conclusion of the WWIII, Magical Theory was the first title to be digitized under the new government's reformation initiative. The second title was Simplified Locomotion;no library would ever have to build a new wing. Honestly, with the advent of digital storage, no library would ever have to be built at all.

You, dear reader, are about to embark on that same journey of enlightenment our forerunners made so long ago. The journey from unknowing into the unknown. You might think you're coming in late in the game; that everything that can be invented has been invented; what with our forests that generate electricity, and floating buildings. However, I remind you of a time when fire was high tech. We had a long way to go then; we have a long way to go now. You could be the one that brings us to the next level and it all starts here: the first level.

Best Regards,

Marcus Montefiore


	2. Thaumaturgy, Syntax, and Slood Dynamics

**Thaumaturgy, Magical Syntax, and Slood Dynamics Inclusive of Reasonable Predictability**

* * *

It's often disagreed how and where magic first came to exist. The Indus people of Asia Minor told stories of a light striking from heaven and turning people into monsters. But it was before that that the Akkad people of Mesopotamia told of a beast that came out of the ocean and imbued people with the power to shoot fire from their fingertips. But it was even before that that the Mayans of the Yukatan told of a Cave that led to the underworld and those who made the pilgrimage would be unstoppable warriors and great lovers. The Mayans did not go half way on their fairy tales. But it was even before the Mayans were talking themselves up that a tablet was carved by a civilization that has been forgotten for centuries that told the story of a city surrounded by walls so high that even the clouds could not pass. The city disappeared in one night, leaving nothing behind. The tablet was found at the bottom of an impressively deep mineshaft in a region of Canada that has oddly variable gravity to this day.

While the origin of the mystery forces might be resolutely mysterious, ever since then people have strived to discover what it is, how it works, an what else it can be used for. At its simplest, magic is energy, like heat, electricity, or speed. It works in fairly predictable ways (with a boatload of exceptions), which, once understood, paves the way for more complex uses. Understanding the simplest operation is the building block for every complex mechanism.

Heat for example, produced by rubbing two rough surfaces together, used to keep warm on lonely cold nights, all fairly straight forward. Rub the two surfaces together long enough you'll get fire, or combustion. Combustion can be used to affect all kinds of changes. It can turn rocks in to iron; water into steam; pigs into bacon. Combine the iron, fire, and steam in the right pattern (what the hell, throw in the bacon) and you've created a steam engine. This engine (with or without bacon) can swiftly move huge, heavy loads vast distances. Time the freight right, and put the rails in the right places and you have functional infrastructure of large scale, thriving economy.

What's true for the long term benefits of rubbing sticks together is also true for magic. Take pure Earth Element thaumatalurgical energy. It can be arranged in a tetrahedral, syzygic, or a Hadron array to conjour a variety of ferrets, transfigure a teacup into a waterfowl, or varnish a deck chair. By logical extension, an Ornithological varnish conjugation can be effected to shield a large filing cabinet from ashwinders, redcaps, and muskrats. An arrangement of these well defended filing cabinets, pentagon shape, ten to fifteen layers deep can create a dampening field, extending seventy kilometers in any direction, excluding south by southwest, that will prevent earthquakes. This arrangement would be useless in New Guinea without the preliminary Ornithological inclusion of at least four nuthatches. This is probably a bad example, if for no other reason than it is impractical to varnish a deck chair.

There are four basic rules to remember when understanding magic.

First is how magic is measured. If you want to build a house, you have to know how long the planks are. If you want to bake a cake, you need to know how much flour you need. And as every child can tell you, overestimate energy consumption, your attempt to make an egg timer do a summersault is going to end in exploding timekeepers. The basic unit of magic is the Thaum. One thaum is the amount of magic needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The unit can be fractured or compounded to measure smaller or larger amounts. One thousandth of a Thaum is a millithaum. One thousand Thaums is a Kilothaum. (In the era before metric, 1/5th of a thaum was a therin, 1/20th of a thaum was a ducat, 1/100th of a thaum was a ping, 7 thaums was a kinnea, 10 thaums was a rhea, 4 kinnea was a krona, 5 krona and 4 rhea was a planchet, 6 krona was falstaf, 2 falstaf was a furlong, and half of a furlong was a langly. The International Confederation of Wizards resisted metricizing for decades because they believed it was too complicated.)

The tool used to measure magic is the Thaumometer. You're average thaumometer looks a bit like a cross between a telescope and a mirror, if either were made of wood. If you don't have a precision instrument handy, which people generally don't, it only weighs a few kilos, but it's the size of a passenger bus, there are some rules of thumb to estimate thaum usage. The object to be enchanted would use 3 thaums for every cubic meter. For every meter per second it's moving, if it wasn't moving before, thaum usage is multiplied by one and a half. Depending on the color of the finished product, add between 4 (periwinkle) and 17 (burgundy) thaums. So a breadbox turned into a lime-green cement mixer that can make the trip between Totleigh and Heathrow in under four hours would use 84 thaums.

It's important from a safety perspective to know how many thaums you, personally, can use before fatal exhaustion sets in. Internal thaum reserves are different for each person. Unlike muscle strength or alcohol tolerance, an individual cannot increase their personal thaumatic reserves; what you get is what you get. It is important to note that magical power is a different animal from magical skill. A person can have enough power to levitate an island and still have trouble managing transfiguring a paperclip into a fountain pen.

Second is the syntax of magic. As any child, and many species of parrot, can tell you, if you want to cast a magic spell, you have to know the magic words. And while 'Please' and 'Thank You' will help with most things, no amount of pleading and thanking will make a coffee pot sing 'Someone Like You'. A skilled wizard can make an item levitate just by concentrating, and many young witches have been known to make things explode when in high dudgeon, but these are special cases, expatiated on in rule four. Wizards can cast wordlessly, sometimes even wandlessly, but the right incantations must at least be thought. It's generally assumed that magical incantations are Latin (Latin is a dead muggle language that refuses to die). Lumos, clearly is Latin; Ducklifors, clearly isn't.

The fact is magical syntax is actually its own language unto itself. Research from the most ancient Magical Library in the world (found in Elmore County, Idaho) revealed that Latin sounding incantations date as far back as the Early Egyptian dynasty. A time when Latin wasn't even a suggestive glint in the Romans eyes. We can deduce that it was actually Magical Syntax inspired the Latin language. In fact, throughout all of human history, from the Akkad people to the Jersey Shore, we see words that are homophonic with Magical Syntax. The implications of this is that A) Magical Syntax predates every other language and has outlasted every one of them. B) It has inspired every other language in civilizations that wizards have had contact with, which means that C) Wizards are not as secretive as they are supposed to be.

Where this language originated from and why it is inextricably linked with magic is anybody's guess. The magical historian, Iwakona Hariyama, postulated that it was the language spoken in the city of walls that vanished so long ago. She attempted to translate the tablet that spoke of it into magical syntax. She had significant success, but made the horrible mistake of reading the translation out loud. She was never seen again. Well, she was, several times, for decades, but not in the way that decent people would describe in print. (For further reading on the subject, see Hariyama's biography: AAAAHAHAAAAAHAAHHHH!)

It would seem to the layperson that, with a fully functioning language, all you would have to do is phrase the correct sentence and you could do anything. That is, in many cases, true. Several sophisticated charms are several pages long, such as the Fidelius Charm. In Culinary magic, making a pot of coffee just right requires chanting for half an hour. Most spells, though, have simple keywords such as Alohomora, or Jellylorum. Magic is not so much a servant that requires careful instructions, but can be compared to a lover that needs to be wooed, and in some cases a politician that needs to be bribed.

An additional difference to conventional communication is the importance of the number 7. Seven is the most magical numbers (Three is the most perfect number, but that's for something else altogether (Additionally, it is generally agreed that the number 4 is a complete skank)). Every magical society, both present and past, has acknowledged its significance and it is always of integral importance in executing the most powerful spells. In reflection of this, the field of arithmancy, the math of magic, calculates in base 7. Instead of going 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, counting would go 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, and going a little further 64, 65, 66, 100, 101, 102… and so on. It's only the graphical representations that are different: e.g. the number 11 in base 10 and the number 14 in base 7 both represent the same empirical amount.

Third is Slood Dynamics. Slood is a naturally occurring substance that can be found easily and abundantly. On the scale of difficulty, it's easier to produce than fire, but harder to find than water. Slood is not, itself, magical, but Slood Dynamics affects every type of magic. In 1745, the Alchemist Panzeer Bjorn attempted to make a Slood free environment and then to use magic within it. He described the results as "A bit like trying to dance to funeral music without a floor."

For whatever reason, Muggles have never discovered Slood. This is not due to wizard intervention, as is the case with Dragons, Unicorns, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster; they simply never found it. They've gotten along fairly well without Slood, but they always have the feeling that something is missing, and this has caused a lot of psychological issues.

Slood has a rhythmic cycle that lasts exactly 2 years, 27 days, 6 hours and between 19 and 60 minutes. The Slood Cycle is divided into seven seasons, each of which is named after one of the Beatles. The length of each individual season is variable, influenced by a combination of lunar cycles, pigeon migrations, attendance at horse markets, and celebrity gossip.

Slood has weather patterns. There are Slood floods, slood tides, slood rain, slood snow, slood blizzards, slood typhoons, slood quakes, slood eruptions, slood drought, and more.

Each Slood season lends itself to certain weather patterns. It slood snows more often in Ringo than Paul, and never in Sutcliffe. Each slood weather pattern has an effect on certain spells. To name a few: if you apperate during a slood blizzard you will arrive at your target late. Summoning charms executed in when the slood is at high tide will attract snakes. Curses used during a slood quake will backfire on the user. The list goes on. Slood weather and cycles are fairly predictable. You can find a variety of slood calendars at any book seller with intensive explanations of the different effects, so we won't delve into it in this text.

Fourth, please remember, by all means, plan for the fact that rules can be, frequently are, broken. Magic is not like the other fundamental forces that make up the universe. In the case of gravity, if you drop a brick the brick will make its way toward the ground. If magic was in charge of the same operation, an occasional brick would pause on the way down to punch you in the crotch. When water gets below a certain temperature, it will turn into ice. If magic was the authority in that domain, every so often cold water would turn into good whiskey to avoid freezing.

Magic is a capricious force, most of the time it follows the rules people have come to expect, but once in a while it will fly off the handle and throw a right tantrum. You can cast the same cheering charm the same way 100 times and get the same result, but the 101st time the same spell will make the sitting room sofa explode. Magic has a unique personality onto itself. It has moods, it has desires, it has ice cream preferences. A skilled wizard can try and use magic when it's feeing lazy and be unable to transfer a teabag. A young wizard can accidentally Apparate to the top of a tall building simply because magic was feeling bored. It is this distinctly human inclination to cause trouble that makes the study and implementation of magic difficult and very often dangerous.


	3. Fundamental Magical Elements

**The Fundamental Magical States and the Elemental Spectrum**

Magic has seven possible states that each have unique attributes. It is important to remember that there are not seven different types of magic, but seven aspects to one force. To better understand this quantum duplicity we reference that one girl we all knew in school, letd be sitting in the library humming herself, a few minutes later shed be sobbing in the lavatory scrawling poetry on the walls (if I have to be honest the poetry was quite good), that afternoon shet possibly have been her that punched a hole through the charms classroom wall, a few seconds after her story fell apart due to the fact that it in no way reflected the physical evidence, eyewitness testimony, and damning evidence written by her on the bathroom wall, she would be weeping contritely and promising to amend her ways. Throughout all these histrionics it was always the same Agnes acting differently depending on her mood.

In the same way that Agnes is a mad cow, Magic can have very different effects depending on what state it is in. Concurrently, two or more magical states can be blended for a different effect. The effect is analogous to blending spices to make a unique flavor, mixing red and blue to make purple, or combining country and western music to create evil.

The first of the fundamental elements is Fire. As advertised, in its purest form it creates fire, such as with Incindio. The Fire element has been used all throughout remembered history, but the first time it was every objectively defined and studied was in the late Hsia Dynasty by So Pek, a Witch who made her career hunting dragons. She was the first person recorded as saying, "Where there's smoke, there's fire."

Hunting dragons is not the safest of occupations, so there were two constants in her line of work: fire and grievous bodily injury. Eventually she learned to control the fire element: how to amplify it and, more importantly, how to disperse it.

She also made a discovery so astonishing that to this day, 4000 years later, people are still startled to hear it. She was able to use her knowledge of the Fire element to heal her injuries. While fire is classically associated with destruction (forest fires, volcanoes, arson, burnt pasta) it is actually a living element. Fire grows, breathes, and moves. In the later years of her life, which at this point was 300 and something, she traveled all throughout Asia and as far west as the Egyptian empire to spread her knowledge of the healing fire element. The entire field of medical magic is based on her work.

The fire element is used for basic heating and light charms. Fire is the basis for all healing magic, as earlier stated. When Fire is used as a component in a more complex enchantment it adds a regenerative aspect to the spell. For example, Feldspar Duplication Charm, which replicates the charmed object at regular intervals, uses the Fire element.

Fire element does not like being used when the sun is not up. It acts persnickety if used with Water. It will be more voracious if there is a large party nearby. It will occasionally cause people to get sick the day before an important meeting or wedding.

The second fundamental element is Water. Water is the sustaining element, everything that lives needs water, and by extension, pees. The Water element was extensively studied by the people of Atlantis. Atlantis is possibly the worst kept secret of the wizarding world, but has fortunately never been linked to a larger magical community. Technically speaking, it's disappearance wasn't magical.

The issue started with the Witch Thocekles, who lived in Atlantis. Atlantis had the minor problem of being built slap-bang on top of a dormant volcano. Later it would have the much larger problem of the volcano no longer being dormant. The constant eruptions caused massive casualties, expensive damage to infrastructure, and did nothing for tourism.

Thocekles had been studying the Water element and its defensive applications. Water could be used to create shields of various strength and size. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with soap bubbles or how hard it is to get ice of a car windshield. For whatever reason Thocekles answer to a volcano wasn't 'moving to a new city' but 'creating a massive subterranean barrier.

Thocekles rallied her fellow wizards and cast the most massive shield charm of it's time that focused the power of the surrounding ocean towards the magma chamber below the island. The eruptions never, to this day, happened again.

Intoxicated with her success, Thocekles built on her success and made another shield surrounding the city. Atlantis was forever safe from their enemy's armies, as well as the then problematic lobster people. Without having to worry about maintaining a standing army, Atlantis could dedicate its resources to innovation. They became the world capital for technology, art, philosophy, and juicy vampire fiction (the undisputed highest earner).

However, the cause of their prosperity was also their undoing. The charm that held the volcano at bay worked too well. Underneath any volcano is a magma chamber filled with molten rock. The one below Atlantis was bigger than the whole island on which the city was built. The charm not only prevented the volcano from erupting but was slowly pushing the magma back into the Earth. Year after year a hollow was growing under the island, and the prosperous island was building bigger and heavier buildings on the surface. Finally, the heavy island fell into the massive cavern underground. The disappearance was total and swift. It left people scratching their heads for centuries. The moral of the story is: if you live next to a volcano, move, because it will do whatever it takes to murder you.

The Water element is used in all shield magic, such as protego, protego horibilis, protego maxims, protego macarena, and so on. In a less creative capacity, it can conjure streams of water. Because of this ability, most wizards in history had no concept of 'wasting water', and were easily identified during a drought as the one house with thriving begonias while all the muggles were trying to keep their babies alive. When water is used in a larger enchantment, it adds a defensive aspect to the spell. Kromrants Marionette Charm uses the water element in creating a puppet that can work in harsh environments (mines, burning buildings, local markets, etc.)

Water is strongest during high tide, especially so during spring tide, by logical extension it weakens during low and neap tides. It is easier to invoke the water element during an election year. Water hangs around on commuter trains and makes people suddenly and severely need to use the bathroom.

The third fundamental element is Earth. Earth is the element of substance. Earth is the simplest and hardest element. It was fully understood very early on in our history and is still a challenge to grasp. The Witch (the study of all seven elements were pioneered by witches, make of that what you will) who originally studied and cohesively explained the Earth element has become something of a legendary figure. Her true name has long been forgotten, whenever she is referred to in antiquity, she is simply called 'The Old Potter Woman'. In spite of an unremarkable monicher, she is credited with training the shamans of ancient Tibet, singlehandedly building the underground city of On Beh (On Beh is a 50,000 year old city underneath the Tibetan Plateau. At its peak it could hold a citizenry of 400,000 people, and today it holds a citizenry of a truly terrifying number of Goblins), and she is the mother of all Goblins (Don't Ask!).

Earth is used in Transfiguration and Conjuring. It is the element that builds and alters. If Earth is blended with other elements the resulting enchantment would create or change an object. Repairo, the fixing spell, uses Earth.

Earth is the simplest element, but it is also the most stubborn. Which is why Transfiguration is the most difficult branch of magic. It performs consistently, regardless of time or environment. It is not generally mischievous, but has been known to make cracks on the sidewalks and spread rumors about your mother's spinal integrity.

The fourth fundamental element is Wind. Officially, Wind is the element of change, but people in the field casually refer to it as the _Douchebag _element, and throughout this text it will be qualified with a similarly derogatory adjective whenever it is brought up. Wind is the most capricious element. Seriously, it's a total airhead. It's completely unaccountable, has no sense of responsibility or punctuality, and keeps making fart jokes.

Wind was first studied and explained by Morgana. In the days when ships had sails and the world was flat (the world wasn't round until 1440) Morgana had the idea to control the winds and send her ships farther and faster, thus cornering the market on trade. While her studies gave her an unprecedented understanding of the _Asshat_ element, using it consistently turned out to be impossible and resulted in the occasional hurricane. She spent the rest of her life tormenting King Arthur and cultivating cheese.

The _Dungbreath_ element is used in hovering, flying and levitation charms. It can also cause weightlessness when it's used as part of a larger enchantment.

The _Pus-For-Brains_ element is famously unreliable. For no good reason the enchantment will just give up and pack it in. Morgana could make a frigate clip the Cape of Good Hope in under an hour one day and be unable to make a feather move the next. It's for this reason that wizards have never enchanted anything bigger than a carpet to fly, and even in that case they had to enchant every thread individually. In the case of brooms every single twig has to be charmed to ensure the broom doesn't start phoning it in midflight. Tom Riddle was the first wizard to be able to fly independently of an enchanted object and taught the technique to his fellow racists Death Eaters. When the war turned against them, this new ability inexplicably stopped working, leaving them unable to escape from the vengeful wrath of the people they had previously been oppressing. This lead theoreticians to believe that Wind has a real mean streak.

The fifth fundamental element is Electricity. This is one of those times when Muggles were ahead of the Wizards. A muggle named Benjamin Franklin discovered how to make miniature lightning. The Ministry for Magic thought he had stumbled upon somekind of magic and ordered the local prefect, Vicera Bathroy, to eliminate him. Since the muggle was prominent in the local government and a widely published journalist, so in the interest of not drawing attention to the lightning machine, Bathroy confiscated all his research and inventions, wiped his memories of the machine, set fire to the street, and blamed it on the redcoats. In the years that followed there was a massive war, and Benjamin Franklin shifted the focus of his work. Bathroy used his research to formalize her own theory of Electricity in the Magical Community, elevating her to celebrity status and disgusting wealth.

Electricity is used in offensive magic. Jinxes, hexes, curses, anything that has to strike hard and fast uses Electricity. Electricity when used as part of a larger enchantment increases the spells speed and intensity. If electricity isn't included in the execution of the full body bind, the victim wouldn't feel the effect for a week and a half.

Electricity is more powerful when used in areas that have high metallic concentration; muggle cities are a prime, tragic example. Electricity acts unpredictably when used within a few kilometers of Earth's magnetic poles, thus explaining the lackluster performance of Greenland's Dueling Society. It plagues women who've just had their hair done.

The sixth fundamental element is Void. Void, as the name implies, is used in dark magic. Void is used in spells that makes objects vanish, break, explode, or causes harm to something alive. The cohesive theory and laws for implementation were formalized by the Witch Kana of the Xhosha. She was feared throughout the South African belt and her notoriety spread as far as Egypt. She is credited with creating the first Nundu (a Nundu is a colossal murder-beast that has never been neutralized by less than 100 skilled wizards working together.)

As pant-shitingly scary as she was abroad, in her home village she was the archetypal benevolent grandmother. She used her dark and terrifying skills to keep threats away from her people. Any warring tribe that was carving its way towards her home was harshly and mysteriously vanished away, never to be met with again.

While there is no confusion of Void as the destruction element, Kana always said that, sometimes, destruction was a good thing. If something old is gone then something new can take its place. If people use the destruction element for evil purposes, that sin is on the caster, not the magic.

Void is strongest when the sun is down and during an eclipse. It will make exactly one sock disappear from the laundry, leaving you with an odd number.

The final fundamental element of magic is Surprise. The Witch who first discovered Surprise was Dactylos, a German who owned the largest flobberworm ranch in the civilized world during the great flobberworm craze of the 1700s. Cultivating flobberworms is less time consuming than, say, making a sandwich, so she had time left over to study the mysterious seventh element.

At this point the other elements had been discovered. It was obvious that there was a seventh element. In Magic everything happens in sevens, additionally some spells had attributes the remaining elements couldn't account for. Apparition, for example, which could move thins over vast distances without passing though the intermediate distance. Cheering charms, for another, could affect a person's mood.

She studied many days, she studied many weeks, (seven days to each week, I would think). Yet she could not pin any significant attributes or any hard and fast rules for this element. It would seem that this mysterious Element was determined to remain mysterious, the wild card of magical chemistry.

Surprise can be invoked fairly easily. Merging it with any other enchantment has unpredictable results. The Protean charm was created when the Surprise Element was folded into a charm for engraving trophies.

Eventually, the flobberworm craze died down, and Dactylos was unable to fund further research. She retired to a small hamlet in Fiji and published the results of her research: "Things just happen, what the hell."

Three centuries had come and gone since then and that remains the most cohesive theory available.


	4. The Seven Fundamental Laws

**The Seven Fundamental Laws of Magic**

As we previously explained, then emphasized, then restated, magic will do whatever it wants. How then, can we apply laws to such a capricious force that has such a seditious attitude towards authority?

Magic may have its own will, but like a turtle with aims of being a speed racer, there are some things it just can't do. Also like our doomed-to-be-disappointed turtle, there are certain things you shouldn't do with it. The laws are an authoritative list of things that either can't be done or can't be done by sane people.

**First Law of Magic: Tamper with the deepest mysteries – the source of life, the essence of self – only if prepared for consequences of the most extreme and dangerous kind.**

This first, highly ominous sounding law, is at first a tad nebulous. What are these mysteries? What are these consequences? What constitutes tampering?

In simplest terms, if you mess around with the foundation, you'll shake everything at the top. There are very simple basic things that we all take for granted and some misguided people try to mess with them. The classic example is the Warlock's Hairy Heart. The story is about a Warlock who does not want to fall in love. While most of us would just avoid dating and buy a pet, he decided to remove his heart. For those of you with a basic grasp of Anatomy, Physiology, Medical Science, or Sanity, you know that a heart isn't supposed to be outside the body. Miraculously, the first symptom wasn't death, and his blood kept pumping as normal. As he so wanted, he did not fall in love. Probably because he had mutilated himself, no women were willing to test his resolve.

However, in his folly, he had created a beast that could neither give, nor receive love. This critical difference forever separated him from the rest of humanity, leaving him friendless and alone. His steep decline sent him on a killing spree, of young women of course. The very last young woman was actually a witch who cursed him to smithereens, ending his horror.

It's fairly easy to judge what should never be altered or divided. Examples include the heart from the body, the body and the soul, the soul itself should remain whole. The mind shouldn't vacate the body if for no other reason that something else might end up in the body while it's vacant.

It isn't even possible for the casual person to even conceive spells that would affect the indivisibility of such things. The casual person knows well enough not to do that. Even still, every so often, someone gets it into their head that they're smart enough, skilled enough, strong enough, to break the law and get away with it. In Ancient Greece, Herpo the Foul designed a ritual that would split his soul so he could forever anchor it to the world so he would never truly die. It worked. His body died, but his soul remains earthbound to this day: screaming in unending agony and of less substance than the meanest ghost.

**Second Law of Magic: The wonder, beauty, and miracle of life is a magic that cannot be made magically.**

Life is the great, self-propagating mystery. Why are we here? How did we get here? What comes next? Can we stop for ice-cream on the way there?

Creating life is pretty easy. You put two willing sheep in the same pen, turn down the lights, put on some music, and in a few months you have a lamb. The biological simplicity of the process makes it surprising that life cannot be created by a spell. There are certain charms that will animate a doll to make it dance around or even talk, but it is not alive. It cannot feel, nor fear, nor laugh. A witch skilled at transfiguration can turn a writing desk into a hog. However, this is merely a facsimile. If you were to cut open the hog you would find it's not flesh, but sawdust, and the hog would be strangely laidback about being cut open.

There have been many a sad story of a lonely witch who has tried to make herself a daughter. They have been accompanied by even more stories of crazed witches kidnapping children. The wizard Geppetto once made a very convincing puppet, the legendary Pinocchio. The story tells of a fairy that turns Pinocchio into a real boy. In real life, Pinocchio dry rotted.

Some enchanters have tried to circumvent this by duplicating a living animal, working under the assumption that life can be multiplied, or at least divided. Initially, it seemed to work, you could multiply animals all you wanted. Wizards that ran slaughterhouses doubled production. The flaw in this spell was revealed with a witch who tried to make extra coin in her poodle breeding business by duplicating her prize poodles. Things went fine for a few months, and then she started getting complaints that the dogs she sold couldn't learn any new tricks. They did not seem to grow fond of their owners. A few more weeks and she was getting complaints that the dogs were…rotting. The minute the real poodle was duplicated, it stopped being a living animal and became two self-propelled meat bags. The problem was remedied by putting two real poodles together and mainlining doggy love potions.

**Third Law of Magic: Any substance can be neither created nor destroyed.**

It's well known among Muggles that you can't create something out of nothing and things don't just disappear. Wizards know this is not true. A skilled wizard can conjure elephants out of thin air. A clever witch can make her annoying neighbor vanish. However, in a very practical sense, the Muggles were right.

The easiest thing to understand, as well as perform, is vanishing. When you vanish, let's say a brick, it does not pop out of existence, but it disassembles into its most minute elements. The brick turns into a fine red dust that disperses into the air. To the casual observer not armed with a microscope, the brick has disappeared. This theoretical brick was tested in practice by the witch Phirela in ancient Sparta. She vanished a brick in a completely sealed room then apparated outside. She apparated back in a week later and there was a thick layer of red dust on the floor. Thus proving that vanished object still exist and explaining why her kitchen was always so dusty.

With conjuring, the other thing happens. The indivisible particles in the air fly together to form whatever is being conjured. Conjuring becomes more difficult depending on the complexity of what is being conjured, and also depending on what is in the air at the time. On a day when there is a lot of detritus fling around you can make a full dinner set. If you're flying through the vacuum you'd be unable to conjure a handkerchief to slow yourself down.

Phirela discovered that you can make a conjuring more successful by performing it over a long period of time. She conjured a gold coin and managed to do it by making the spell continue over the course of a day. There wasn't enough gold flecks flying through the air to make the coin all at once, but eventually enough of it blew within range of the spell. She posited that you could make a self-casting device, possibly many, that would collect gold like a reservoir collects water. There was never any evidence that she created such a device, but the goblins were always strangely friendly to her.

**Fourth Law of Magic: Death can be cheated, but never denied.**

No spell can bring the dead back to life. Not gonna happen. Nope. Never. Nu-uh.

There is a field of magic called Necromancy which attempts to do that very thing. They have never had anything that can be viewed as success; not in measurable terms, not by a hopeful, drunken madman, not in the faintest.

The Voodoo shamans claim to make bring back the dead as servants, but these have been either Inferi (a human corpse that is moved around by an enchantment to do certain tasks) or a person, who never died, under a debilitatingly strong Confundus charm.

Other charlatans, claiming to bring back the dead, have in fact just reenvervated a seriously ill person with a very slow heartbeat and respiration. Mistaken burials are a popular, horrifying urban legend. The story goes that a person is thought to be dead, but is in fact in a very deep sleep, brought on by some kind of sickness or poison. Their breath and heartbeat so slow and delicate the doctors cannot detect these faint signs of life. Their grieving families, similarly inept, have a funeral and bury them. Years later, their caskets are dug up, and there are scratches on the inside of the lid of the casket from the occupant waking up and trying desperately to claw their way out.

You may or may not be comforted by the fact that this is a myth in the sense that no one has ever been buried alive accidentally. Even the most inept medicine man can tell the difference between a live patient and a dead body. There have been people buried alive on purpose, but that is endemic of a separate problem altogether.

Antiquity has many stories of people coming back from the dead. Most of these stories are very circumspect about the state of the person after the fact. These narratives talk about a person dying then coming back as some kind of an ethereal force, but never as an actual walking around person. The idea of coming back from the dead is such an impossibility that even the most fanciful of legends don't even make direct eye contact with the idea.

The exception, and indeed the most compelling case, comes from Asia Minor about a carpenter who was executed on trumped up charges after getting on the wrong side of the local religious officials. The joke was on them; the charges didn't stick and neither did the punishment.

Ghosts are the faintest echoes of those who have died. They have no potential to be real people, nor can they communicate with the dead, nor can they give us any hint as to what is on the other side.

Death has something of a bad reputation. What most people don't realize is that they find Death deeply comforting. The dead do not return. A monster that dies stays dead. The same is true for any despot, murderer, warlord, or mother-in-law. Any evildoer that gets conquered, stays conquered.

**Fifth Law of Magic: Everything exists in Balance. **

Everything in the world exists in a balance. This balance is both perfect, and vengeful. This balance is most easily demonstrated by the shape of the planet you are now on. The western hemisphere isn't a modicum heavier than the eastern hemisphere. If you mail a spoonful of dirt from China to Canada, then Africa will steal a tree branch from Bermuda to settle the score.

Similarly, when magic is used to alter something as simple as a tablespoon or as cumbersome as a porpoise, the natural balance will get its kick in. The most dramatic, or rather, entertaining example of this is the after effect of love potions. As any child can tell you, you can't create love by mixing some oils and frogs eyes together. The only thing a potion can accomplish is creating a fixation, an obsession with a person. The sensation only lasts as long as the potion is in the victims system. Once the effect wears off, the balance kicks in. In the hours following the recovery the victim who was previously seeing sunshine and rainbows will have a change in attitude that can best be described as homicidal. The person they were previously smitten with will be the object of their vindictive disdain. This after effect is the reason love potions aren't actually used very often.

There is a similar effect with cheering charms. There is a comedown period after the charm wears off, the victim would be hard-pressed to feel excited about a dancing bear in a revealing nightgown.

**Sixth Law of Magic: There is no Sixth Law.**

There is no sixth law, as stated above. Where magic is concerned, things occur in sevens, so a blank placeholder was put in to round out the total number to seven. Most Magical Theoreticians have full faith that we will discover a Sixth Law. There are other, kill joy, theoreticians that contend that continued studies will yield more than seven laws. In that eventuality, we will label them as 6a, 6b, 6c, and so on. In at least a bureaucratic sense, we will have seven laws.

**Seventh Law of Magic: Magic can accomplish many things, and many things should never be done.**

This law can best be summarized as: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Many muggleborn witches and wizards enter the world of magic and are startled to find that witches and wizards have all the same problems as mere mortals. Magical people have crime, poverty, heartache, illness, also dragons. Muggles are sure that magic can solve every conceivable problem. They aren't wrong, but it also causes as many problems as it solves, if not more. For every spell that repairs a horse cart, there are five curses that cause a horse plague. For every spell that makes gold, there are five goblins that will steal the shirt off your back and bill you for the defrocking. And at the end of the day, no matter how many spells we have that heal, you only need one curse that kills.

These magical problems have a non-magical solution. Don't cast any spells, no matter how much you want to, unless you absolutely have to cast them. Self-control will solve problems magic never could. Should you find yourself in want of money, work harder and tighten the belt. If you have a cold, sleep it off. If you want revenge on your enemy, learn to forgive. If someone you love doesn't love you back, we've all been there honey; get rip roaring drunk, sleep in the next morning, and move on; there's someone out there for you.


End file.
